Should red meat carry a health warning?

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Alex Renton investigates the link between what we eat and the increased risk of diet-related cancers

We’re hard-wired to eat meat: all we can get of it. Research shows that if you
give a diet of unlimited meat to omnivorous animals, whether a fly, a mouse
or a chimpanzee, they will go on gorging until they are fat and ill. And
that is precisely what has happened to humans.

For most Britons meat is cheaper than at any time in history, and we have
tucked in. Annually, we consume more than our own body weight in animal
flesh: nearly twice as much as health guidelines say we should. But that’s
still puny compared with the meat